Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Disorganization Principle

It has come to my attention that the overwhelming majority of what I like to call those Big Bad Information Blogs [BBIB] are very "organized." There are tabs and links to previous posts and "hashtags" and dynamical interfaces which pile toolbar upon toolbar the further down the page you go. Then there are those tiny blogs (this used to be one of them) that are simply "public" journals; a place where people write their thoughts and feelings about this or that, quite sporadically, most of them dying (the blogs, not the authors) after a few months' worth of posts.

I aim to avoid both extremes. You will find BBIB content here; there will be some inter-linking and some intra-linking; I may even spruce the place up a bit at some point. But you won't get BBIB style. The style remains that of the informal public journal, and not wholly unlike Medium (whose inventor, incidentally, also invented Blogger; cf. "Why We Built Medium"). I find this approach quite fitting because that is precisely how my mind works. Big thoughts run into little thoughts and back again; connections are made and conundrums simplified, but not without painstaking research. You won't find what you're looking for in one sitting, and you'll kick yourself when you realized you missed something at the last sitting. To wit, to find what you're looking for, you're going to have to do a fair amount of "scrolling." And, let it be known, if you don't have to look deeply as well as widely, you can be sure that, whatever that world might be into which you venture, it is certainly not my own.

Besides, what good will I be, after I'm dead, to all those scholars -- with their sweater-vests and their iPhones -- if they have no tidying up and cataloging and annotating to do? Should I, by my life's work, have to deprive them of theirs? Indeed, would the Husserl Archives be half so enticing if there wasn't all that clerk-work to do? new angles of thought or chronology to be plumbed? exciting and fresh material to be discovered, which happened to be hiding, under a bushel of dust, far at the back of one of those deep, venerable, ancient filing cabinets?

No comments:

Post a Comment

About Me

An obscurantist who takes pleasure in holding the unpopular view, dynamiter of the Train of Progress, and vehement defender of Dead White Men.
Also a guitarist: listen to demos at ReverbNation.com/JohnnieOrson